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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: Myanmar

Who are the Rohingya?

28 Thu Sep 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Opinion and Response

≈ Comments Off on Who are the Rohingya?

Tags

Akyab, Arakan, Bengal, Buddhism, Burma, citizenship, double minority complex, Islam, Konbaung, Michalis Michael, Mrauk-U, Muslim, Myanmar, Ne Win, Pakistan, Rakhine, Rakhine Nationalities Development Party, Rohingya, terrorism, Union Solidarity and Development Party, World War II

The plight of the Rohingya in Burma has yet again surfaced and momentarily captured international attention. Tens of thousands of Burma’s Muslim minority, residents of the western Burmese province of Rakhine, are fleeing across the border into Bangladesh to escape persecution. Typically, global attention has been fixated on ameliorating the immediate human tragedy while ignoring the deeper causes for the periodic unrest. As a result, there has been the inadvertent yet inevitable conflation of several fissures such as separatism, a fear of Islamism, and Buddhist nationalism; it has largely escaped notice that the Rohingya are often the targets of not just the Burmese military but also Rakhine Buddhists. The previous round of violence in 2012, for example, was precipitated by the military government’s move to grant many Rohingya citizenship (although the cassus belli was the gang rape of a Buddhist woman).

The latest spiral of violence began on August 25 when over 150 Rohingya terrorists launched a coordinated attack on a military base that housed the 552nd Light Infantry Battalion and 24 police stations across Rakhine. The predictable military reprisal has left tens of thousands homeless and some reports suggest that half the Rohingya population may have fled Burma. Two observations need to be made here: the first is the obvious that the roots of this violence go far back to even before Burmese independence in 1948, and the second is that the nature of the conflict has been shaped by external political realities and evolved over time.

Early Arakan was ruled by Indian kings and the province served as a launching point for Mauryan Buddhist missionaries on their way to Southeast Asia. The Muslim kingdom of Mrauk-U was established in 1430 with the help of the Bengal sultanate, though Islam is said to have reached the region by the tenth century. Arakan was only peripherally a part of the Burmese empire until 1784 when Mrauk-U fell to Bodawpaya of the Burmese Konbaung dynasty. However, a predominantly Buddhist socio-cultural milieu pulled Arakan in a manner that political suzerainty did not.

With the British annexation of Arakan into the Raj after the First Anglo-Burmese War in 1826 came the first modern waves of Muslim migration to avail of new agricultural opportunities. Returning local peasants who had fled the wars found that their land had been given away by the British to Bengali immigrants. So severe was the migration that Muslims, who constituted barely 10 percent of the population of Akyab (northern Rakhine) in 1869, were well over 33 percent by 1931. A 1941 British Report on Indian Immigration noted with some concern that the rapidly changing demographics “contained the seed of future communal troubles” and had foreboding remarks on the Islamicisation of Arakan.

World War II crystallised the cleavages between the migrant Muslims and the local Buddhists as the former sided with the British and the latter with the Japanese. By the end of the fighting, Muslims found themselves concentrated in Akyab while the rest of Arakan was held by the Buddhists. The brutality of modern war in the jungle created wounds between the communities that never healed and rumours began to surface that Akyab may be ceded by the British to Bengal to become part of the future state of (East) Pakistan than join Burma. There is no evidence this was considered seriously but both Archibald Wavell and Mohammad Ali Jinnah briefly flirted with the idea before turning it down.

Interestingly, Rakhine Buddhists, who are of a different ethnicity yet same religion from the majority Bamar, began an armed agitation for independence the same time the Rohingya were rebelling for a separate state in 1946. Yangon managed to remove the sting from these groups by the mid-1950s but over 50 armed ethnic groups remain in Burma and have been the targets of periodic offensives by the military. Many of the grievances of the Rakhine were resolved by the 1974 Burmese constitution; Prime Minister Ne Win’s Revolutionary Council renamed Arakan as Rakhine with the understanding that Burma is a federation of ethnicities. The same reforms rejected Rohingya appeals as it was argued that the term ‘Rohingya’ does not appear in any British document during their 122-year rule over Burma. The closest word to the term was ‘Rooinga,’ derived from Bengali and referring to geography rather than ethnicity.

In the 2010 elections, the Rakhine Nationalities Development Party won 35 of the 44 seats in the state legislature; it also became the second-largest bloc in the national House of Nationalities, which they have used to give voice to Buddhist concerns across Burma.

Such terms were not extended the Rohingya for a couple of reasons. The 1948 citizenship law clearly stated that only those whose ancestors lived within the borders of present-day Burma before 1823 would be eligible for citizenship, disqualifying the enormous wave of migrants that settled in Arakan under the British. While critics have argued that the 1982 law would have allowed a gradual, three-generation process of assimilation by recognising different classes of citizenship for those who moved to Burma before 1948 – associate, naturalised, and full – this was poorly implemented in the provinces due to the Rakhine fear of Islamicisation among the Rohingya.

Reports have surfaced at regular intervals of ties between Burmese Muslims and Pakistani intelligence, al Qa’ida, the Taliban, and Saudi Wahhabists. Fearing the introduction of jihadist tendencies in their country, the Rakhine have campaigned hard – politically as well as violently – against bringing the Rohingya into the Burmese fold. In fact, there was uproar in Burma when the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development Party tried to grant citizenship to the Rohingyas prior to the 2010 elections to counter the success of the RNDP in the polls.

As Anthony Ware of Deakin University has argued, the Rohingya-Rakhine hostility can best be explained by Michalis Michael’s theory of a double minority complex. In such a situation, the majority in a country feel as if they are a threatened minority competing for territorial survival and nationalistic autonomy. The Rakhine feel overwhelmed by the constant and centuries-old religious and territorial encroachment by their Muslim neighbours, their own minority status with respect to the ruling Bamar majority, and the international media that is hell-bent on ignoring their concerns for the sake of political correctness.

The minority Rohingya view of history is that Arakan was never Burmese until 1784 and the Muslim Mrauk-U kingdom validates their claim to the region. According to the Rohingya, the population influx from Chittagong was not of new migrants but the return of Muslims who had fled Burmese occupation. With the demographic and military power balance skewed against them, the Rohingya feel intensely insecure in a Burmese national narrative they neither wish to partake in nor belong.

Although it is easy for outsiders to proffer solutions to the Rohingya imbroglio, this is ultimately a question for the Burmese themselves: for the Buddhists if they can live with their Muslim neighbours as part of their nation or at least imagine Burma as a multi-national state, and for the Rohingya, if they can let go of Islam’s perpetuity clause on real estate, its harsh exclusivity practices, and belong to an infidel nation without making demands for special considerations and rights. Even then, this question may continue to fester as Burma’s demographic composition alters and may have to be revisited in a generation. After all, democracy does not reward who is right but only who is more plentiful. In that case, all we would have accomplished is to kick another problem on to our descendants.

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Prudence And Its Discontents

11 Thu Jun 2015

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, Security, South Asia

≈ Comments Off on Prudence And Its Discontents

Tags

IK Gujral, India, Myanmar, nuclear, Pakistan, PV Narasimha Rao, terrorism

There is only one reason India’s recent raid into Myanmar has captured everyone’s imagination – its implications along India’s western border with Pakistan. This obsession with the Islamic Republic hinges on the fact that it has, for three decades, aided terrorists against India and harboured them on its soil, even protecting them with the threat of nuclear retaliation against India. Naturally, the Indian media and commentariat have wondered – egged on by the ambiguously suggestive wording of statements by some government sources – if last week’s cross-border raid is a template for future Indian counter-terrorism operations, especially along the western border. Criticism has come along two axes – the veiled references to Pakistan, a much graver threat, and to the publicity the military operation has received.

Upon news of India’s incursion into Myanmar breaking, Pakistan’s interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, made a rather banal remark when he warned India that “Pakistan was not Myanmar.” Indian security officials would be the first to testify that the latter is a friendly neighbour that has a long history of cooperation with India in matters of cross-border terrorism and narcotics trafficking while the former is a well-armed, hostile, nuclear state sponsor of terrorism that still struggles to find a raison d’etre that is not in opposition to India. Any references equating the two theatres have simply been misunderstood; rather, they most likely were to suggest that the differences between Myanmar and Pakistan will no longer tie Delhi’s hands against provocations from Rawalpindi.

Guilty for their sins of omission in the development of the Pakistani bomb, Western governments have now taken to urging Delhi to act with prudence in its dealings with Islamabad despite the incessant and almost daily provocations from across the border. While they continue to sell weapons to the Islamic Republic, they simultaneously appeal to Delhi’s wisdom and forbearance with its irksome and unstable neighbour and cast Indian military modernisation as destabilising. Delhi must think for itself whether these recommendations have yielded any positive results over the past so many decades.

In responding to Pakistan, India must learn from its neighbour. Islamabad has shown Delhi how useless nuclear weapons become at lower thresholds of conflict. Delhi must therefore lower its threshold of conflict to below the Pakistani nuclear tripwire. It is almost certain that a massive military incursion by India, however limited and short, would trigger Pakistan’s nuclear tripwire; it is questionable how it would respond to small yet intense raids a la Myanmar, and it is beyond doubt that Islamabad would struggle to justify a nuclear response to “forceful persuasion” of terrorist leaders to give up their trade or an upswell in the yearning of its Baloch or Pashtun population for liberty. Were India to emulate its western neighbours and engage in such pursuits, the upside is that there is little that Rawalpindi can do in retaliation that it is not doing already.

Such operations take a high degree of skill and material sophistication which is, by all indications, presently beyond Indian capabilities. Nonetheless, the Myanmar mission indicates a change in thinking and direction in Delhi and though it serves as no template for operations across India’s other borders, the political intent is quite clear: the tepid security legacies of PV Narasimha Rao and IK Gujral have been jettisoned for more pragmatic measures. There has always been a constituency in India urging the strengthening of Pakistan’s civilian institutions by bestowing legitimacy through engagement. However, India can only do so as far as Pakistan’s own security apparatus is willing to do the same – one cannot become Ashoka without fighting Kalinga.

If India does resort to conflict below Pakistan’s nuclear threshold, some of it will have to receive some publicity despite the thick veil of secrecy that shrouds security affairs in India. Some ascribe prudence or noble motivations to it as discretion being the better part of valour but the likelihood of it being the government’s reluctance to share information with its citizens is higher. Public displays of covert planning are as vital an ingredient of deterrence as weapons systems for deterrence is ultimately a psychological weapon. If the enemy perceives India to be strong or is certain of repercussions in case of misadventures, an additional pause is given to its planning. One of the best examples of this is Charles de Gaulle’s myth of the French Resistance during World War II; another is Italian diplomacy of the early Cold War when Italian bureaucrats and politicians leveraged their close and sometimes clandestine relations with the United States and the CIA for enhanced prestige within Europe and the North Atlantic alliance. Such behaviour actually created another component of national identity and bolstered Rome’s actual relevance on the international scene.

Undoubtedly, some of India’s operations will never be acknowledged, others will only be whispered in shadowy corners, and a limited handful will become the stuff of legends; only the security agencies should distinguish between the three. The lessons from Israel’s intelligence agencies are there to be seen: out of the hundreds of operations run in the neighbourhood, a small handful like Wolfgang Lotz, Eli Cohen, Thunderbolt, and the Wrath of G-d were enough to create the illusion of an unforgiving and invincible Israel. In an era where media has become another theatre of war, it would be a myopic for Indian planners to disregard the advantages of publicising a few, well chosen operations.

Albert Einstein is credited with defining insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Inhis book, Through the Looking Glass, Appu Soman chronicles over a decade of diplomacy between India and Pakistan and how little it has yielded. Restraint is a virtue, India’s commentariat seems to have forgotten, only if one is thought to have other options. The Myanmar operation may not be a template for Pakistan, but it was certainly the announcement of a change in thinking at Raisina Hill. Let the word go out.


This post appeared on FirstPost on June 15, 2015.

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Raid on Myanmar

10 Wed Jun 2015

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in India, Opinion and Response, Security, South Asia

≈ Comments Off on Raid on Myanmar

Tags

21 Para, 6 Dogra, Ajit Doval, Burma, Chandel, Chassad, China, India, Kanglei Yawol Kunna Lup, KYKL, Manipur, Myanmar, Nagaland, Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland (Khaplang), Noklak, NSCN (K), Pakistan, terrorism

Five days after a deadly attack on a convoy of Indian troops of the 6 Dogra Regiment in the Chandel district of Manipur left 18 soldiers dead and at least 11 more injured, Indian Special Forces of 21 Para conducted a raid into neighbouring Myanmar to attack and destroy two rebel bases belonging to the Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland (Khaplang) and the Kanglei Yawol Kunna Lup. One base was on the Nagaland-Myanmar border near Noklak and the other on the Manipur-Myanmar border near Chassad. Reports put casualties among the insurgents at anywhere between 20 and 100 while there were no losses among the Indian forces.

The raid has been hailed by the citizens of India, including the media, as sensational, daring, and proportional. While information on the operation is plenty, quality is less so; conflicting stories have emerged in the Indian press about the equipment used (Mi-35, Dhruv), whether the Indian military actually crossed the border, and if so, whether the Burmese government was informed. Some unconfirmed reports suggest that India acted upon impeccable intelligence while others suggest that unmanned aerial vehicles played a more important role in the preparations for the operation.

Thirty-six hours after the fact, it appears more certain that the international border was indeed crossed though Myanmar initially stated that it had been informed of the raid but later denied that Indian troops had ever crossed the border; permission was not a concern as the armies of the two states have had a tacit understanding between them since at least the mid-1990s which has since been solemnised via treaty. Regarding this particular operation, Naypyitaw was informed of the specifics well after Indian forces had engaged with their targets.

Newspapers also reported that National Security Advisor Ajit Doval and Gen. Dalbir Singh changed plans to meet, discuss, coordinate, and oversee the operation with the defence minister Manohar Parrikar. The political decision to strike back, apparently, had been taken within 24 hours of the ambush on 6 Dogra but the military was not ready to launch an immediate counteroffensive. Air strikes with Sukhoi fighter jets were considered but abandoned after the risk of collateral damage was found to be too high. Major General Ranbir Singh announced after the mission that the action had been preemptive as well as retaliatory as intelligence revealed that the groups had planned further attacks into India in the near future.

The political impact of this military action is unmistakable. Domestically, it reinforces Narendra Modi’s image as a tough, no-nonsense prime minister willing to take difficult and potentially uncomfortable decisions. Regionally, the raid into Myanmar sent a strong message to insurgents taking refuge in India’s neighbouring states that Modi’s India is willing to come after them if necessary. It also put China on notice that its support of rebel groups in India’s northeastern region has not gone unnoticed and localised cooperation will thwart Beijing’s perfidious intentions, by force if necessary. As the greatest patron of cross-border terrorism in the region, Pakistan could not have failed to get the message implicit in the Indian Army’s raid into Myanmar.

For some, the eager reporting on the incident has come off as unwarranted, jingoistic chest-thumping. This, of course, is an activity reserved solely for one’s own convenience and no other. In any case, the context of such euphoria explains its reasons quite well:  Indians feel that, over the decades, they have consistently come out worse in asymmetric conflict with their neighbours. The unsatisfactory response to repeated attacks on Bombay (March 1993, July 2006, November 2008, July 2011), the hijack of Indian Airlines flight IC 814 to Kandahar in December 1999, and the attack on the Lok Sabha in December 2001, not to mention the countless ambushes of police and military convoys have left most feeling anaemic in a deteriorating security situation. While this was not the first Indian counter-terrorism operation, it was one of the very few known ones that acted with such speed, focus, purpose, and was so successful.

In response to India’s operations in the East, Pakistan’s interior minister, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, warned Delhi that such adventures will not succeed against his country which was capable of giving a befitting reply. “Pakistan is not Myanmar,” Nisar reminded India. There are several points here: first, such rhetoric is expected in international relations – in fact, it would be astonishing if Rawalpindi announced that it was worried about India’s resolve and would consequently roll up some of the terrorist camps along the Line of Control. Second, no two military operations are exactly alike and to compare Indian operations in Myanmar, conducted in concert with a cooperative neighbour, with potential raids into the terrorist safe haven of Pakistan stretches credulity. India’s options against Pakistan are different from those it has in the east. Nevertheless, Tuesday’s operation is a far cry from winding up covert operations against enemies in the east and west as former prime ministers PV Narasimha Rao and IK Gujral did. In that sense, what may be mistaken for chest-thumping is actually relief.

All said and done, the government could have managed the post-operation publicity with more aplomb. A single informative statement from the military that covered all aspects of the mission they were willing to discuss would have been preferable to the buffet of contradictions and multiplicity of government voices on the subject. Contrary to some concerns, the publicity will not hurt future operations – it is highly unlikely that terrorists do not know that the Indian Army possesses drones, commandos, and helicopters. Silence only keeps the common citizen in the dark. Besides, a public celebration of such successes is important for citizens’ morale as well as geopolitical signalling.

Many Indians take particular pride in their country’s use of soft power in sensitive regions like Afghanistan and are allergic to the “cowboy solutions” for which some other countries have an affinity. This, however, should not be construed for being a soft state. Unfortunately, that is exactly what India had become in the name of prudence. Tuesday’s actions smacked of an Israeli flavour, something that has many admirers in India. The raid into Myanmar, though not conducive to a cut-paste job to the Western front, was nonetheless a first step in the rebuilding of Indian special operations capabilities. Raising it to be a panacea to all of India’s asymmetric security ills and then to criticise it is to just tilt at straw men.


This post appeared on FirstPost on June 11, 2015.

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